Part. Chapter 1.I had had so many spiritual deaths and rebirths and turning-points and now, when the epic was finished and the artist was reborn, I was free to return to India - and then go on to China.
In the meantime, in March 1955, another great peace demonstration took place and my mother was keen to see it. She was eighty- two now but very vigorous and I did not try to dissuade her and told her where to stand and watch.
I went to my assembly point and the march was uneventful until we reached St Martin's Lane where the mounted police were waiting. And all at once there was pandemonium. No distinction could be made between the marchers and the bystanders and those who backed into doorways were trapped and half crushed. The police reared their horses as they drove them into us and we ducked and scattered and ran down the side streets .But every time they cleared the street and then moved off to break up another section, we returned and reformed and marched again until eventually we reached Trafalgar Square. There, the police left us and from the plinth of Nelson's Column the leaders of the Movement delivered their passionate speeches and the huge gathering responded.
When I arrived home I listened, astonished, to my mother's story. She had not stood passively watching when the marchers appeared but had joined them and, evading the trouble when it came, had marched into Trafalgar Square at the head of the column.
The next day, there were protests in the press against the action of the police. Their very brutality now showed how important and how much of a threat to the government, the Peace Movement had become.
From Banaras on march 28th, Sir C.P. commented:
'I read with intense fascination & also with pained surprise your account of the peace demonstration…I thought such things were outmoded & obsolete in England which, in my opinion, is the most balanced country in the world & which still retains a keen sense of proportion & humour…The World Peace Movement is gaining strength & the sheer folly of alternative (atomic) methods is beginning to be realised. Bravo! And all power to your elbow!… ....
The majority of the AWPA committed had boycotted the demonstration as being Communist inspired, just as they had refUsed to adhere to the Vienna Declaration, and had ignored my report on the Odense Conference and, thoroughly exasperated now, I tried to shake up this precious group of self-isolating writers. At meetings, in letters and in long telephone talks I challenged their political timidity.
In a letter to the secretary, dated April 19th, I wrote:
When I signed the Appeal four years ago I belonged to no church or political party and I believed that AWPA would provide the broad enlightened substitite that I needed. It appeared to me as a spontaneous, novel and revolutionary movement of great significance in which I could at last express my views and feelings and through which I could go into action. Had I forseen that it would do no morel than engage in various non-controversial, respectable and long-term activities (useful as these are) I should certainly not have been so excited. I now realise that even if the other 800 signatories had signed as I did - desiring & expecting action - the original Appeal was far too vague & the membership far too broad for it ever to have been possible for the handful on the .C. to have plunged the whole movement into action every time a crisis flared up. But having admitted this, I am still not capitulating to the Labour Party and abandoning my quest for action…some way must be found for AWPA writers to move forward as artists and citizens - undivided…And I think that finding this way should be the main purpose of the forthcoming conference
Education was one of my suggestions:
After a long historical period of relative security and no radical change, many writers need to be awakened and reminded of their power and of the role they should be playing
The organisation of the writers of a country is the first step and if their purpose can be achieved by a joint statement well and good. But if it can't and the world moves rapidly from one crisis to another, then the organization must move too, or remain at the starting point , its influence decreasing the longer it lags behind. But from statement to action is a hard jump, I well realise, which not all will be willing to attempt and if the jump becomes still harder few will follow to the end Should the writers of our time be forced to jump only to scramble back in a ftiry to their original positions? Should they be challenged, a flinty stone lobbed into the sweet sun-scented places where they lie so that they spring away like grasshoppers, in all directions? Or should, and could, they be persuaded and led? I don't know.
I was fed up with writers. Ostracised by the PEN Club and at loggerheads with most of the AWPA committee members, my real allegiance now was to the British Peace Committee where I found positive people [albeit Communists!] and made new friends
While all this was going on, my mother had been suffering from persistent diahorrea, apparently incurable, and as her wonderful vitality ebbed I was sure that she was going to die.
She had been examined in several hospitals but when she was finally seen by a specialist in the Middlesex Hospital in Acton 'who did unmentionable things to me', she came away feeling better and soon afterwards she returned to spend a fortnight being observed. She went alone and wrote the same day.
'It would have been crazy for you to come with me - just a long boring bus ride…I am now settled in - on a very comfortable bed - dozens of pillows- most luxurious How foolish I was to come in my best clothes. But my new things & best hat are all safe in my locker …I feel this is just a week of lazing in bed & being waited on…Do promise not to visit me…. . The next day.
'This really is a beautifully run hospital - spotlessly clean - the ward with sun on three sides - open wind - freedom .I roamed all over the place after breakfast. Sat on a seat - lovely Acton air!! The patients look a miserable lot - really ill - some would be better with a little pill to help them to' pass on'. Mostly elderly. Comparing Grandma, gasping for breath & fighting through exhaustion - always plucky. These old things wallowing in their miseries. One next to me her face lined by years of self-pity. Nevertheless, some still have a spark of sex appeal! My vis-à-vis - stone deaf, spoon fed, utterly helpless, has her wisps of white hair tied with pink bows behind each ear. Another fat limp, a few beds off, also bedridden, straight greasy brown mane has it tied on top with 2 magenta lovers knots. I feel quite out of this beauty parlour. Their doctors must be more susceptible than mine. All that I am sure would be lost on him so I don't regret not having brought my pearls…During the night I was waked by weird snorts & snarls. I might have been in a jungle…sick humans reverting to animals in old age - but I slept again & waked refreshed. .'
I took her a book and she wrote the next day. 'I loved your visit & the book but I hope you will never do it again & anyway, I can't be here very long. When I went again it was to bring her home and the mysterious complaint only occasionally returned.
I went regularly to the Theatre Royal in Stratford East. Joan Littlewoohad no use for my plays [they were not social realism] but I admired her and the company. She was still trying to give high drama to the people and still the people, did not want it . The actors played to empty houses and were so poor that they could barely eat and could not pay for lodgings and were camping illegally in the theatre, not daring to keep on any lights after the doors closed and in constant fear of being discovered.
In May of that year [1955] Joan obtained the money to take the company with two plays, ' As You Like it'' and 'Arden of Faversham'' to Paris for the International Theatre Festival. And I went with them. Four days later I wrote to my mother; 'They have made a great hit in Paris yet still their story is fantastic. '.
The foreign critics were enthusiastic and the London ones who had never troubled to go down to Stratford now filled their columns with long excited eulogies. Suddenly the company was famous. The British Embassy honoured them with a special reception from which several of the more uncompromising Party members stayed away , sorry to be missing the exquisite food and drink but pleased to be able to demonstrate. their contempt for His Majesty's plenipotentiary and a fraudulent occasion.
When they returned to England, the bourgeoisie flocked down to Stratford and the actors ate, threw away their rags .switched on the lights and slept in soft beds. But Joan Littlewood had failed. More than one brave missionary excursion was needed to convert the heathen, the disinherited of London's East End.
A month later , at the invitation of the Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries and the League of Polish women, I left for Poland in a delegation of twelve women drawn from different walks of life and professions and with different outlooks.
These package tours were a feature of the propaganda war as it was conducted then, and designed to counter the pictures of unmitigated misery and oppression in all the Iron Curtain countries, painted by the propagandists of the west
They were very popular since they were free, with no strings attached and luxuriously arranged and so people were constantly setting out eastwards, 'to see for themselves'. It was worth the risk of being called a fellow- traveller, or worse, on return. They paid for them by just talking about all the good things that they saw and did. And for most of them this was easy for the not-so-good which were never shown to them, had to be felt, guessed at and divined
I went on. to Helsinki to attend the 1955 World Peace Congress - on my own. AWPA would not even send an observer .And I was asked to broadcast my impressions of Poland.
I had whirled all round the country with my group and seen the busy smiling, glowing surface but at the end, when I spent several days alone in Warsaw, waiting to fly on, and I walked about and talked to people - I saw and learnt much more. When submitting my impression I tried to be objective -praise everything I could, yet speak the truth.
I spoke of Poland's tragic history and went on to say that revolutions are judged not only by their achievements, but by their methods, by the measure of their ruthlessness; that Poland was altering her whole way of life, grafting the new onto what is good of the old, with the minimum of oppression. But it was not the message that they wanted and it did not go out on the air to England.
After ten days of speeches, working commissions and entertainments, progressing upon an ever rising tide of fervour and flow of mutual love, the Congress came to a spectacular end. On July 1st I wrote. To my mother:
'On the last day word went round that we were all invited to visit Russia before going home! (1800 of us!) . And then, in a closing speech by a Chinese poet, we were all invited to China! I could stay away & wander the world as a guest of the new countries - paid for & feted indefinitely! What an extraordinary world this is! 400 of us are going to Leningrad & Moscow & then on to the Black Sea for a rest… But I shall not go on to china now I am in the mood to come home, filled with new energy & zest for work. When I am ready I shall ask to go to China - & prepare the way, take my own work, take English poetry, take something of myself & England - recite & lecture so that the traffic is not all one-way..
I have found the world for which all my life I have been searching blindly. Instead of perpetually swimming against the current, alone - I am with it & surrounded by friends. Everything goes easily & everything comes to me. I want to travel the world without money. I can. 'Come to us, they say, & stay as long as you like' They clamour for my work. Instead of being always on the outside, despised & neglected - unable to meet the people that I need to meet I am accepted for myself without money or importance. This is the sweet world springing up beside & within the old decayed & dying one - and I have found it & entered it & give to it myself & my work. '.
'Wonderful people I meet along the road…& the country is familiar for it was already inside me and I dance with understanding & dedicate myself anew. I am reborn
We leave for Leningrad tonight , travelling down the Karelian Peninsular, away from the country of 1000 lakes & white nights to the land of the Muscovites & red revolution. When I reach home, l.et us go down to Appledore & enjoy the salt seas of England & rest for a short while from the excitement of living
The excitement of living. Another sighting of an ideal world and another .rebirth. How lovely they were then and how pathetic they sound now, chasing all those appearances and changing as I ran, breathless & lyrical. But it was time that I stopped running and caught hold of something real.
From Leningrad I went onto Moscow and then flew home and, ata joint meeting of the two organisations, Science for Peace and Teachers for Peace, gave a long account of the rise & development of the peace movement from the first World Congress in 1949 to the 4th at Helsinki - and into the great story I wove my own - and concluded;
After a long and ominous winter and a cold late spring the harvest is ripening and we must make ourselves ready to go out and reap
The AWPA Committee rejected my report on Helsinki and when, instead of resigning, I became the secretary (because no one else wanted the job) and tried to turn my house into a centre of the progressive movement - I failed.
A different kind of demonstration now took place in London. People. came from all over the country to lobby their M.P's and we stood outside the House of Commons in a queue, four abreast, which stretched as far as Lambeth bridge. They let us in four or five at a time. And we sang as we waited - until the mounted police appeared. Word came down the line that Churchill had ordered them out.
They rode into the queue, hitting and chasing people as they scattered, even beating up an M.P. who had come out to speak to his constituents. When the scrimmage ended there were bodies lying all over Palace Yard..
This time there was a storm of protest, the whole country was shocked and when we marched again the police marched with us. A year later , I wound up the work of the committee and AWPA dissolved itself for, a third world war, with atomic weapons, had been averted, peace was no longer a dirty word and even the cold war subsided for awhile.